I was standing in the
backyard of the House of Tomorrow a few weeks after I graduated from
high
school when all of a sudden it became clear to me what I ought to be
doing
with the manual typewriter I'd just been given as a graduation
present.
A hand fell on my shoulder, as it were, and a voice whispered in my
heart.
The voice said, "Write."

Since I always heed voices
like that,
I set out to try. And within a year, straining against my
limits,
I produced something like an original science fiction novel.
It was
nowhere near good, but it was a starting point.

Writing has been my way
to wonder about things.
I've written science fiction and fantasy. I've also written
about
the meaning of story and the nature of the imagination.

All
together,
I've published eleven books, four of them with my wife Cory.
The
titles listed below are available as indicated, either from us or in
electronic or print-on-demand editions.

-- Alexei Panshin

RITE
OF PASSAGE

A
girl who lives
on an immense interstellar ship must manage to survive Trial for a
month
in the wilds of a colony planet. John Brunner described the
story
as, "An impressive portrayal of the psychological and moral
coming-of-age
of a young girl whose upbringing and background are truly of the future
yet whose problems are universal." The Science Fiction
Writers of
America gave Rite of Passage a Nebula Award as Best Novel of the Year.

This
is Cory's and my account of the first appearances in fiction of the
transcendent
images of SF--from a creature brought to life by electricity
to human
galactic empire. Winner of a Hugo Award in competition with
books
by Arthur C. Clarke, Harlan Ellison, Robert A. Heinlein and Ursula K.
LeGuin
at the World Science Fiction Convention in The Hague. Isaac
Asimov
called it, "The best, the best, history of science fiction I
have
ever read." And Northrop Frye said, "I learned a great deal
from
reading The World Beyond the Hill."

The
adventures of interstellar remittance man Anthony Villiers and his
unfathomable alien companion, Torve the Trogs in a universe of con
artists, yaghoots, and High Tag. When the three novels collected here
were first published, Analog
called them "glorious, ridiculous tongue-in-cheek parody of almost
anything you can think of" and Algis Budrys wrote in Galaxy, "Read the
book. Stop asking silly questions."

When
rebellious barons rise up against the King of the Gets, the king's son
Haldane finds himself on the run with no protection against his enemies
except the undependable spells of a self-taught wizard and the even
more perilous favors of Libera, the half-forgotten goddess of witches
and peasants.

An excerpt consisting of the first seven chapters can be downloaded in
pdf form from Arc Manor.

This collection
of all my most lefthanded pieces of writing was my belated
way of
addressing a friend who didn't manage to survive the minefield of life
in the late Twentieth Century. Like an elephant in the dark,
it's
more than just a bunch of parts. You might think of its nature as
something
like this site.

This
was my first
book, originally published in SF fanzines in Canada, England and the
United
States. No one had ever written a full-length study of the
stories
of any SF writer before, and the World Science Fiction Convention voted
me the initial Fan Writer Hugo Award for it. But Heinlein
polarizes
opinion, so even today on alt.fan.heinlein
you will find both those who are ready to say that the book is a
fairminded
first word and those who declare me lower than wormshit for writing
such
awful things about the man and his work.

Twenty-two essays
are gathered here, including second and third thoughts about Robert
Heinlein's
stories. These reconsiderations, reviews and speculations by
Cory
and me show the development of a new view of the nature of
SF. Ian
Watson said, "The strong suit of this book is its urgent, but never
dumbly
optimistic, sense of what might be possible, what imaginative span SF
might
be able to encompass in the future."